Captain's Log

Early Start

I was up at 05:00 and ready to roll by 06:30. The early start was due to the length of today's walk. It would be a 25 mile haul from the village of Wall to the centre of Newcastle. It was a Sunday morning and the sensible Wall residents had stayed in bed. I headed off at a faster than usual pace since I wanted to feel like I was making progress. It didn't help that the first part of the walk was uphill. I soon reached St Oswald's church. The St Oswald's trail starts/finishes here and you can follow it all the way to Lindisfarne if you wanted. I'd save that one for another day. I'd seen the last of the Wall not far from the village of Wall, and I now followed the ditch that the Roman's built alongside the Wall. It is important to realise that Hadrian's Wall is much more than just the wall. The Romans also built defensive ditches as well as the Vallum on the south side of the wall. The Vallum is a huge ditch and was built after the wall. It was around 6m wide and 2m high. It is still unclear as to why the Romans spent so much effort building this earthwork. One theory is that it was like a demilitarized zone that separated the civilians in the south from the Wall's military operations. Other historians believe it may have been originally designed as the foundation of a road. In fact, a road had already been built before Hadrian Wall's construction and was known as the Stanegate (means 'stone road' in the Northumbrian dialect).  This roughly followed the line that Hadrian's Wall would later follow. There was also the Military Way, a road that ran near to the Vallum and constructed around 162 AD, after the abandonment of the Antonine Wall (further north in Scotland). The Romans were doing so much civil engineering it is hardly surprising that they didn't have time to keep the pesky Scots under control.

Last Of The Paradise Flapjack

I thought I'd be too early to catch the huge Errington Coffee House open and sure enough, I wasn't wrong. I consoled myself by eating the last of my Paradise Flapjack. The two treacly slabs had provided me with enough energy to get through 4 days and over 60 miles of the trail. I would be running on reserves from now on.

The next long (very long) section to Heddon-on-the-Hill was alongside a relatively busy road. Most of the time, there was a stone wall or a hedgerow running between the path and the road. It was still noisy though. I plugged in my iPod and reduced the noise to a distant rumble. The paths were good, but compared to what I'd witnessed thus far, the scenery was less inspiring with most of it being fields. Just east of East Wallhouses I stopped at the picnic tables at the reservoir known as the Great Northern Lake. I got my stove out and brewed myself a coffee. I was already missing the Paradise Flapjack. Rehydrated, I slung my rucksack back on to my shoulders and continued along the trail towards Heddon-on-the-Hill. It was still a long way off, but I knew that there was a Spar at a petrol station there, where I could get a proper refill of food and drink.

Heddon-on-the-Hill

'I'VE LOST MY MUMMY!' I was sitting on a bench in the memorial gardens behind the Spar at Heddon-on-the-Hill, contemplating how I was going to physically eat and drink all the stuff that I'd just bought from the shop. The young boy had mysteriously turned up in front of me and was bawling that he was lost. 'Which way did you get into this park?' I asked him. 'I'VE LOST MY MUMMY!' he screamed again. I stood up, which was probably a bad move, since this seemed to scare him and he started running across the park. I started following him and then for one moment (to my shame) I wondered if this might be a ruse to separate me from my rucksack so that it could be stolen. As I stopped to calculate the probabilities of this, the young boy stumbled into the path of a female thru-hiker who was wearing a  fluorescent, pink lycra clad outfit, who had just entered the park. She seemed to take control of the situation and led the boy by the hand to the other side of the park. What luck! I was dreading having to do something similar since such scenarios are open to misinterpretation. I settled back down to consider my lunch when the pink lycra lady appeared in front of me. 'Did he find his mother?' I asked. 'Yes.' And then continued 'I'm doing the Hadrian's Wall Path in 3 days. Where do I go from here? I started at Tynemouth and so am doing a proper coast-to-coast' with the implication that ordinary people like me weren't. I pointed to the exit of the park and told her to follow the road past the Three Tuns pub to the dual carriageway. 'From there, the route is well signed' I continued. 'Do I walk along the road to the dual carriageway?' 'No, there is a pavement.' 'Is there a bridge over the dual carriageway?' 'Yes.' 'Where is the Three Tuns pub?' I led her to the edge of the park and showed her the pub. In some ways it would have been easier dealing with the lost child. She strode off towards it and that was the last I saw of this pink lycra clad phenomenon.

George Stephenson

To be honest, the signage isn't that good through Heddon-on-the-Hill and even though I'd followed this route a couple of times before, I still managed to go wrong for a hundred yards on this occasion. As I escaped the village I got a wonderful view down the Tyne valley. Although the city's bridges were hidden by a dog-leg in the river, I could still see the vast outskirts of the city. The trail dropped down on to the Wylam Waggonway. George Stephenson was brought up in Wylam. In 1812, he worked at a local colliery and managed to persuade his superior into letting him build a railway engine. He must have been a pretty good blagger since he built 15 other ones by 1819. He must have impressed the management team since he was asked to build an 8 mile railway between Hetton and Sunderland, the world's first railway. As they say, the rest is history. A great thing about walking in the UK is that you can drop in on places like this. Who would have thought that the world's railway systems would have been kick started by a young George Stephenson when he was inspired seeing the trams on the Wylam Waggonway.

Bandit Country

I was on tarmac now and so it would remain for the rest of the day and also the stretch tomorrow from Newcastle to Wallsend. It was hard on the legs, especially after all the mileage I'd covered today. I met up with the River Tyne and followed it to Newburn. Many people were out enjoying the sun. I'd not done the trail from Newburn into Newcastle before and wasn't sure what to expect. I'd hoped that it would roughly follow the line of the river with good open views. What I actually got was a tarmac bridleway with dense undergrowth on either side. Gradually, I lost all the other walkers and the long, shaded foliage route felt a little bit threatening. I'd got out my iPod to pass the time, when somebody scooted by me on an electric bike, an inch or so from my shoulder. This was no ordinary electric bike since I'd estimate its speed at being 40mph or more. The rider was wearing a black puffy jacket (on a hot day?) and a black balaclava. I took my iPod off and packed it in my rucksack, together with my phone and wallet. It was quite a few miles along that trail into Newcastle and it felt a tense affair. Three similarly clad riders sped past me at one point but they didn't stop. These weren't kids; they looked rather hefty. It certainly would not  be a route that I'd want to do if it was getting dark; well, certainly not without some night-light goggles and an AR57 slung around my neck with the safety catch off. As I approached the footbridge over the A1, one of the bandits appeared from the east side, took a long look at me and then accelerated off along a northern bridleway. I wondered if he was going to get his mates. On the tarmac, at the entrance to the footbridge, there was some obscene racist graffiti. I wondered how this made the locals feel as well as the international thru-hikers. A few years back, I remembered seeing a clip on one of those police documentaries favoured by Channel 5. The police had taken to trail bikes to try and catch idiots riding around these bridleways on stolen trail bikes. On that particular episode, somebody had dumped the stolen bike at this exact spot, and then was later caught by the police trail bike rider. It seemed times had progressed and modified E-bikes had now taken over from the trail bikes. There were no police in evidence today, but given the nature of the trails it would be an impossible to patrol anyway. It was with some relief that I reached the end of this bridleway section and dropped down on to the pavement besides a dual carriageway. In truth, I was never explicitly threatened at any point along this section of the trail, but it wasn't a comfortable section to walk.

River Tyne

I dropped down from the dual carriageway to the pathway that runs alongside the River Tyne. Although graffiti was still prevalent, I felt that I was walking in much safer territory now. I even felt confident enough to have a chat with a lad that was fishing off the quayside. He told me about the fish that had '...just got away...' as he put fresh bait on his hook. His girlfriend was sat in a collapsible chair reading a book. She looked at me and raised her eyebrows as if to say 'she'd heard it all before.' There were quite a few information boards on display leading into the centre. The vandals had been hard at work though and some weren't legible. It would have been a really nice walk into the centre if it hadn't been for all the litter and graffiti. There was so much history here. Eventually, the Tyne turned a corner and the multiple city centre bridges came into sight. Trains and cars sped north and southwards across these aerial carriageways. I find the bridges at Newcastle an impressive sight. There is none more impressive than that green monster, the Tyne Bridge. What a wonderful piece of engineering. It was also wonderful in that it provided the finishing line for my 25 mile walk from the village of Wall. I dashed under the bridge to avoid any Kittiwake shite from above. The bridge provides a home for thousands of these amazing birds (1,200 pairs, in fact). Some Kittiwake 'hotels' have been built on the bridge, to provide alternative accommodation whilst maintenance was being carried out. It seemed that the Kittiwakes didn't like the new 'hotels' and stuck to where they'd nested before. My hotel was the Quayside Premier Inn that was next door to the bridge. It was so close, that I listened to the Kittiwakes calling as I fell asleep, and they were my alarm bell when I woke up in the morning.

It had been a massive day's walking. In truth, some of it had been a bit monotonous, but that could be said about most trails. I'd found the stretch from Newburn to Elswick an uneasy walk; not one that I'd like to repeat on my own. This area exudes history though and that made it all very interesting.